Bouncing Back by Linda Graham, a marriage and family therapist and expert in neuroscience, is an excellent book for learning about the science behind resilience.
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In this book, Linda Graham discusses the neuroscience of resilience and how we can apply these findings to build our own resilience. She also discusses many factors that can enhance our resilience, providing additional research evidence for Tria Corda Ministry’s model of resilience.
If you want to learn more about how to improve your resilience and how your brain can support this journey, pick up a copy of the book.
What is Resilience?
Rick Hanson, another famous resilience researcher, writes in the foreword of Bouncing Back that the stress-diathesis model, a key concept in the book, is critical for understanding resilience. In simpler terms, this model states that three factors shape our stress response: the intensity of the stressor, our unique vulnerabilities, and compensating resources.
These compensating resources (such as good physical or mental health) help offset the intensity of stressors or vulnerabilities, allowing us to act resiliently.
These compensating resources are the focus of the book, and Graham writes that they allow us to respond to stressors, such as trauma, quickly, adaptively, and effectively.
Graham writes that when we are resilient, we can cope in healthy ways. This healthy coping involves remaining calm, being clear, having others to rely on, feeling competent, and having courage.
Resilience not only helps us cope with stress in healthy ways but also enables us to find profound meaning and fulfillment in life. This transformative power of resilience offers hope and optimism, inspiring us to navigate life’s challenges with courage and grace.
Throughout the book, Graham emphasizes two brain processes involved in building resilience, both early in life and in our present moment. They are:
- Conditioning: An automatic process that encodes the things we learn in our brains
- Neuroplasticity: Our brain’s ability to rewire itself and override old patterns.
By harnessing our neuroplasticity, we can override non-resilient patterns of acting. Graham also emphasizes that conditioning in our early relationship with our parents has a tremendous impact on our resilience, or lack of it.
The Early Building Blocks of Resilience (or the Lack of It)
Good conditioning early in life teaches us resilience. Graham writes that this happens primarily in the parent-child relationship because when we are young, we learn only by connecting with others.
Our attachments to our parents provide the conditioning that shapes our typical response to stressors and determines whether this response is resilient.
There are four attachment styles, each with its own parenting style, which in turn shapes the attachment style and its consequences. These attachment patterns usually remain stable after we reach the age of 2.5, unless we have a corrective, healing experience with another loved one later in life.
These four attachment styles are:
- Secure attachment: This develops when our parents are attentive and responsive most of the time. This consistency teaches our brains how to cope with stress. The soothing of our parents strengthens the parts of the brain that regulate our emotions, especially when we are stressed. The foundation of secure attachment teaches us that we are loved and that it is good to reach out to others when we are in distress.
- Insecure-avoidant attachment: When parents are dismissive, rejecting, critical, or indifferent, children learn that others will not help them when they are distressed. This experience leads to becoming overly self-reliant and dismissive of others’ help in times of distress.
- Insecure-anxious attachment: When parents are inconsistent (sometimes dismissive, sometimes responsive), children become confused and are unable to pick or learn a consistent coping style, leading to confusion when stress does come.
- Disorganized attachment: This style is rare and usually results from abuse, in which the parent, whom we naturally want to attach to, is a source of danger. This type of attachment leads to very unhealthy patterns of distress.
Graham underscores the role of relationships based on unconditional love and effective therapy in rewiring our attachment styles. This reassures us that even if we have an insecure or disorganized attachment style, there is hope and support available for healing. To explore Catholic healing resources for attachment style difficulties, visit this page.
What Builds Resilience?
After laying the groundwork for the neuroscience behind resilience, Graham then spends the rest of the book examining various factors that promote resilience.
Graham is a mindfulness trainer, and she emphasizes the importance of mindfulness and empathy for training the brain to act resiliently. Research shows that mindfulness helps us to become aware of anti-resilient patterns, and empathy helps us to build crucial connections with others.
Important Note:
Tria Corda Ministry’s reviews of non-Catholic, scientific books that offer helpful insights on resilience and related topics are not endorsements of all aspects of the books. This book is one of those times when I do not endorse everything it offers.
Throughout the book, Graham veers into Buddhist principles to teach people how to cultivate mindfulness, which do not always align with Catholic teaching. This veering is something to be aware of if you do pick up a copy of this book.
Mindfulness itself is not against Catholic teaching. Being in the present moment, which is where God is, is critical. Those who teach it can sometimes veer into New Age or Buddhist practices, which are not core to mindfulness but are against Catholic teaching. For a treatment of mindfulness and how Catholics can grow in it, I recommend The Mindful Catholic by Dr. Gregory Bottaro.
Back to the Content
With this foundation of mindfulness and empathy, Graham then reviews several factors for building resilience. Many of the factors reviewed fall into the Tria Corda Ministry’s five building blocks of resilience, which are:
- Mental Health: Living in accordance with the truth in your thinking
- Physical Health: Good friendships and taking care of your body
- Spiritual Health: Prayer and regular reception of the Sacraments
- Virtue: Living a virtuous life and striving for that
- Vocation: Investing in our state-in-life vocations and other callings God gives us.
The following is a list of factors Graham has found to improve resilience and how they map onto these categories of resilience-building activities:
- Mental health: Self-understanding, self-compassion, confidence, positive emotions, calm, and flexibility
- Physical health: Comfort with one’s body, interpersonal skills, and finding security and unconditional love in relationships
- Spiritual health: Spirituality is a resource for coping in a resilient way.
- Virtue: Courage, perseverance, and emotion regulation
Unfortunately, none of these factors map onto the vocation category of resilience-building activities.
By providing a psychological research base for these factors and their role in resilience, Bouncing Back further supports the resilience model we use here at Tria Corda Ministry.
Conclusion
Bouncing Back by Linda Graham is a good resource for learning more about the science of resilience and the struggles we may have with it. Through its review of several factors that promote resilience, it provides additional research support for the Tria Corda Ministry model of resilience, as well as for the importance of (Catholic) mindfulness in growing in resilience. You can pick up your copy to learn more about resilience here.